If money wasn't an issue, I would imagine that
the best scenario would be to use a very beefy
intel-based PC with an overhead projector and one of the
continuous speech voice recognition packages trained to the
speech of the moderator, and with all of the words used
in the tournament 'learned' by the software. Best to
use a slower-paced moderator with excellent
diction.
The speech recognition programs are strongly
CPU-dependent, but should be able to keep up with most
moderators' reading speed. If the software did make a mistake
or two, it's usually on homonyms or close words,
which in context might be easy to make out.
The
moderator could speak into a microphone which he/she could
turn off at each buzz (or better yet have the
microphone built into the lockout system).
The player
would then have a short period of time to write the
answer on a whiteboard-pad and show it to the
moderator.
This, I think, would work. You would only need this
setup in one room; the moderator could stay constant or
they could move rooms. I don't think this would put an
undue strain on a program.
Jer